Posts tagged “quality time”

I don’t know about you, but if there is one thing that wears me out before it has even started, it is shopping. What traumatic experience ever caused this apparently unique disorder, I don’t know, but for as long as I remember, for me, shopping is an endurance race. And after the first 3 shops, it is right out torture. And so when my wife, daughter and son banded together against me to devote the rest of the day on shopping, I categorically refused and stuck my heels deep in the Chengdu soil. This time I serious; I wasn’t going to give in. Not me, not now. (more…)

Disclaimer: do not read this article while eating! And with that said, let’s dive right into it: China is changing rapidly and its toilets are changing with it. Notably slower though.

But toilets have always, how shall I put it, intrigued me. After all, we spend quite some time there. As a boy I would sit and study the patterns of the floor and walls while doing my business. In the shapes and lines on the concrete floor I would see the outlines of countries, of wild roses at the point of withering; the list of what I saw was endless and always growing. Sometimes though, I would see faces. An old man with a sharp nose and deep eyes, a girl’s face with wavy long hair falling down her bare shoulders. Sinterklaas. Well, today it happened again. (more…)

Buckets of tears we shed, and believe me, it was a real family happening. Everyone joined in. Eyes watered and messed up mascara -not that we have mascara, but it visualizes the flow of tears so nicely- and soon enough large murky floods poured out from us that would dwarf the 3 Gorges Dam. Noses dripped like leaking taps. My son handed me a tissue -again. It was the same one I passed on to my wife just a minute ago. Tissues were shared. For the last time. The last time! “Whaaah!!!” And off we went again. (more…)

You know how big-city life and a busy job and, now I’m at it, a family, can make you feel confined; imprisoned in inevitable routines and unchangeable habits. Tired. Then it is time for an escape; time for wilderness and raw freedom. Then it’s time for the Tibetan mountains. And so I planned a 10-day trip to Sertar monastery high up in the far western mountains of Sichuan and made the necessary preparations: talking with insiders; watching the latest news; taking my altitude tables. All was fine -that is to say; as fine as can be expected in these parts- and I was ready. How little did I know… (more…)

People dream. People wonder. People stare. At times, we are lost in our thoughts. Moments when we find ourselves physically present but mentally in another world. Unconsciously staring out, but looking in. An impression of these moments… (read more).

All progress has a price. Well known are of course the issues of over-population and pollution and corruption and spoiled kids. But not often mentioned, surely not in China, is the issue of equality. Yes, you read it correctly: the issue of equality. Equality as an issue.

So I called Alain de Botton. Not really, of course -for who am I?- but real enough to include this philosophical thinker and popular crowd speaker on this matter in an imaginative roundtable talk. (more…)

Heavenly Hotels (2) (click here for part 1) (Note: This blog was meant to be published after part 1 -seems logic, doesn’t it?!- but somehow got blocked rather than blogged, then delayed and forgotten …Here it is anyway…)

Ever forgot your 20th wedding anniversary? Take heart: it can only happen once. And it happened to me -nearly. I know, I know, how could I? -don’t get me started. To be honest, I was a bit surprised myself because as far as I could remember, our tenth anniversary was only a year ago.

As it was, my wife was much too busy to complain about it and first I intended to let it quietly slip-by; I was busy too. Maybe she won’t notice. And, hey, didn’t we already go on holiday twice a year?

My wife and daughter had taken the afternoon and evening off. Recognition flights. Recognition flights for mum and daughter surveying personalities and shops, developing character and taste, and previewing which future paths to take and which latest movies to skip. I usually receive a full report upon return. From both. My wife will reflect on the topics discussed; My daughter on the items not bought. Nonetheless, a good time, not the least because they’re leaving the men to themselves.

It is during these imposed men’ s nights that my son Asher and I drive around -with Asher behind the wheel, be it on my lap; that we go for a walk in the neighborhood; that we photograph the man on his bike, the ducks hanging head-down from the tree, the small red butt sticking out the split in the baby’s trousers, or that we play chess. Later on in the evening we get our huge Chinese chopping knives out and fix our favorite dishes while sweating away in our too small kitchen. For reason no one has ever been able to explain, kitchen counters in Chengdu are very low, even for the Chinese. They keep forgetting to build drawers. I have to stand legs wide when I do the dish wash like a giraffe drinking water from a well. I convinced my wife that this is not healthy for me and we agreed to delegate the dish washing duty to our kids. The kids were for obvious reasons not in on this meeting.

It was during an orange chopping session that Asher dropped the question: “Dad, what does the F-word mean? Some kids in my class know it but I don’t…” There are those questions you know will come at some point in time, but when they come you feel desperately ill prepared. Here hidden away under the shadows of the most eastern Tibetan hills, sex, drugs and rock’n roll are still centuries away. Though HIV and drugs aren’t unknown in China, it isn’t on people’s radar as much as in The West and teenage-moms are virtually unheard of. Kids here seem to stick to their innocence and do their homework a bit longer and are not worried about boyfriends or condoms or clean needles. I guess you can call it one of the blessings of a family-oriented society where two parents, a handful of grandparents and a busload of uncles and aunts pressure the one and only child to perform and eventually provide. Or is it the blessings of an internet policy that prevents half the ‘morally corrupting’ sites available in http://www.freeworld.com to be seen? Maybe it is just due to lack of catchy TV stations to watch.

But it wasn’t so much the sexual aspect of the topic that troubled me. I’ve worked enough with kids as well as parents who habitually used these words in every sentence -for as far as they were able to speak complete sentences anyway- explaining to them the origin and the meaning and the use of this abbreviation and the word. No, it wasn’t so much the meaning that troubled me as much as the time it would take to do so. As a hard working dad, I needed some personal wind-down time. So I planned an escape.

“You mean the S-word?”

“No dad, I don’t know any S-word. I mean the F-word.”

“Sure you know the S-word; you’re teacher uses that every day in class! Doesn’t she always say: ‘as soon as I say the S-word, you can start’?”

“That’s not the S-word, that’s the G-word, dad.”

“Aha, I see.”

“Yes, the G-word, and it stands for ‘go’.”

A thoughtful silence followed. I desperately needed some time to think. All I wanted was to quietly read my book. For a moment I flirted with the idea to delegate this question. “Why don’t you ask your teacher tomorrow?!” but I couldn’t. Wasn’t this our men’s night? Wasn’t this the ideal stereotype question fitting an evening as this? Still, I needed time. “I’ll shower first, we’ll discuss this later -go and play after you’re done here.”

I found him playing in the living room with his favorite cars; causing traffic jams and accidents on the Cheng Guan Kuai Kong Road. I was just about to feel relieved when he looked up to me – and I knew: the question would come again. And so over dinner that evening, father and son were talking about eggs, seeds, stems and testicles, slowly painting a simplified picture of the complexity called reproduction that even scientists have not yet fully unraveled, just because of the F-word. Before we reached the heart of the matter though, Asher had lost interest and turned to more urgent and pressing issues: how to solve his traffic jam and what chess piece to move. I suppose it had been sufficient enough for a ten year old. Just as I sat back and picked up my book, the doorbell rang; mum and daughter had returned.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin basked in his biggest ever election victory on Monday, extending his rule over the world's largest country for another six years at a time when his ties with the West are on a hostile trajectory.